initrd question

[Gregory Nowak]

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Thanks for the info Doug, I'll take a look at it. What concerns me the
most is whether speechd-up and speech-dispatcher are staticly built or
not. I already know that the espeak binary is staticly
linked I think, and being able to use play or aplay would eliminate the need for
libportaudio. My other concern is the amount of dependencies that the
speech-dispatcher debian package seems to have.

The other thing I wasn't sure about was what libraries I'd need to
copy over to have everything (I.E. speech-dispatcher and alsa)
working. My main goal after all would be to install a minimal
distribution (even just the debian base system would be too big), the
single purpose of which would be to boot, restore alsa parameters,
start speech-dispatcher/speechd-up, load up support for the
chipset/hard drive, and hand off control to the root fs, with software
speech already running, and speaking things such as e2fsck running,
and the rest of the boot process up until login and beyond of
course. I'm not even going to throw compiling all sound card modules
into the mix, the initial job of having this work would be hard enough
as it is with just knowing what sound card is going to be used.

I guess the other question to ask is would the initial amount of ram
required for something like this, be a good enough of a trade off to
have speech early enough in the boot process to hear the system on the
hd booting, but potentially not early enough to hear kernel panics?
Since the initrd ram does get released though, that may not be a big
deal with the amount of ram your typical pc has these days.

Some food for thought I guess. If I have time to work on this, and if
I manage to pull it off, I'll definitely post the steps for getting it
done. Of course, if someone else has the time, and wants to beat me to
it, feel free.

Greg



On Fri, Jul 06, 2007 at 10:31:48PM -0500, Doug Sutherland wrote:
> Greg,
> 
> This is an interesting question. Many embedded linux systems
> use initrd as the permanent root file system loaded from flash.
> What you are proposing should be possible, since relatively 
> speaking you have gobs of memory to work with. Check 
> out this big blue document on the topic
> 
> http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-initrd.html
> 
> This useful too:
> http://www.faqs.org/docs/evms/x3834.html
> 
> You'd need a large ramdisk to fit all that in there, but in 
> theory at least it seems feasible. There is kernel parameter
> initrd= where you can specify memory address and the 
> ramdisk size, for example
> 
> initrd=0xa1500000,8M root=/dev/ram
> 
>   -- Doug
> 
> 
> 
> 

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